


in the end (and not before)

by untiltheveryend



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Not Epilogue Compliant, Post War, major character deaths from the series are mentioned, there is an element of magic that is non-canon (aka I made it up)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 01:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19122238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/untiltheveryend/pseuds/untiltheveryend
Summary: There had been a time when Ginny considered herself a little bit in love with everyone she knew. Her mother and father, her stupid smelly brothers. Her two best friends at Ottery St. Catchpole Elementary School, both muggles. The lady at the general store who always gave them an extra sweet in their paper bags of goodies. And then there was Harry Potter.Ginny had grown older somewhat since then, realised that the whole world will not love you. That the whole world does not deserve to be loved.Lessons like that are almost always hard-earned.Or, another ending for Ginny Weasley, because she deserved more than the one she got.





	in the end (and not before)

**Author's Note:**

> This is unapologetically a Ginny Weasley story. It is also a story about choosing to fight, and the things you lose when you do so. It’s about love, and friends, and learning to live after the war you’ve been fighting is over. 
> 
> Please forgive any small mistakes and rough edges, I wrote and edited this by myself.

Luna finds Ginny on the first night of their sixth year, with her back against a cold stone wall somewhere near the entrance to the astronomy tower, trying to remember how to breathe.

There are some things that are impossible to forget.

Ginny can’t tell exactly what Luna is doing, too busy keeping her head above water in an ocean of panic, but she knows when it works, feels the rush of calm, like a cool sheet wrapped around her shoulders. Is suddenly aware of the steadying of her pulse and the sudden closeness of Luna’s hair, a swaying curtain that moves with Ginny’s breaths, still puffed out like each one is a little bit impossible.

“What was that?” Ginny asks her, after the shock of it has somewhat worn off.

“It was a calming rune,” Luna tells her, voice low. “Good for wackspurts.”

Ginny huffs out an almost-laugh, and Luna looks at her and adds in a practical sort of tone, “It helps when you’re sad, too.”

 

-

 

Ginny Weasley was not a girl who let fate hold all the cards. As a pale eleven year old, she had watched herself fade away without even knowing it. These days, she would like to at least see it happening.

She prods Luna about the rune-spell, promises to go Nargle hunting with her, bribes her with odd snacks from the kitchens until Luna stops telling her that it’s _complicated_ and sits her down to show her _why_.

It isn’t a spell, or at least not in the way that Ginny has been taught. It’s like oil-painting or muggle embroidery. Luna traces the tip of her wand over the back of Ginny’s arm in a pattern that would probably look like a lacy doily from her great-aunt Muriel’s house, if she drew it out with a quill. But the tip of her wand leaves only the most fleeting of traces, and the pattern seems to exist only in Luna’s head.

“It’s not about the picture you draw, it’s about the way it makes you feel,” Luna tells her.

“So I could draw an octopus?” Ginny asks and Luna scolds her gently.

“Focus on the feeling you want to give to me, and then draw what feels right.”

Ginny closes her eyes, and tries to fill herself up with calm, like pouring pumpkin juice into her breakfast glass. She presses the tip of her wand against Luna’s skin, maybe a little harder than she intended, and starts tracing.

Nothing happens, the first time. Or the dozen times after that.

She huddles over Luna’s arm at breakfast and dinner, while Luna reads or strings colourful beads onto the ends of her hair, and gives her gentle encouragement that is only occasionally helpful. The thirty-fourth time she tries, it takes.

Ginny knows that it worked, even without the sound that Luna makes in response. She wonders if Luna can feel the wave of joy that floods through her, and then wonders if she would even notice. She looks pretty happy all on her own.

 

-

 

Ginny spends two days perfecting her new skill, and then a week and a half slowly teaching herself half-a-dozen variants.

Luna is a dreamy-inventor, her eyes full of stars and her hands purposeful. Her wand isn’t a trigger, or a path through the woods. It’s a still, dark pool. It’s an ocean. She dips in her hands and lifts them out brimming with secrets. Then she twists them into knots and slips them into her pockets to save for later.

Ginny watches as Luna teaches her how to Spell a sneeze, and wonders how she could have missed this all these years.

Ginny has always thought of magic as a sort of practical and methodical tool, like her mother's cooking and cleaning spells. That magic comes when she called for it had been clear to her, but she had never thought to ask where it came from. It’s like living your whole life knowing the sky is blue and then looking up for the first time and seeing that it’s orange instead. She feels brimming - with the magic, with the knowing. With the having asked in the first place.

 

-

 

Ginny never gets a chance to tell Luna, but in the darkest moments in those terrible months she presses her fingertips against her own skin and traces calm and warmth and peace. The strength she finds to continue is fabricated in those quiet moments, when Ginny lets her mind fill with Luna’s painfully absent face.

It is a comfort in a comfortless world.

 

-

 

In the end, the tipping point that her future rests on is a conversation so short it’s over practically before it started. She knows what it is to be worried for the kids who look up to her, but it has been long years since she looked at Harry that way. She wishes she knew at what point he had started to think of her as something to protect instead of value.

It’s not that she doesn’t want to be thought of as a thing (as porcelain, breakable), it’s that she needs something more.

She needs for Harry to hold out his hand and just know that she will be there by his side to grab it. For him to search for her face in a crowd, not to check that she is safe and still breathing, but because he wants to share a joke, or a smile.

She doesn’t think he knows how to be that person.

 

-

 

She doesn’t leave with Harry, after it is all over and done with, and she doesn’t go home either. Home feels like a fragile construct that she isn’t game to test, when so much else has been broken. She takes George back to their- _his_ flat, instead. He is a boat set adrift.

She sits him down gently and wraps a blanket around his shoulders. She makes them both hot chocolate and traces simple, lazy patterns on the side of George’s mug with her wand. When the contents are warm but not scalding hot, and infused with as much comfort and peace as Ginny can manage, she hands it over to her brother to sip at.

He stares at her over the rim and asks her, “When did you get so grown up?”

She doesn’t have the heart to tell him.

Because it isn’t that she grew, it’s that she leapt. Her, and Neville and Luna, and their little army of kids (just kids). Survivors and warriors. They held court in the walls of a school that had once been their playground, became rats and moles. They snuck food out of the kitchen with more fear in their hearts than the threat of detention from McGonagall had ever mustered.

There are two kinds of survivors in a war zone. The protectors and the protected. Everyone else is just collateral damage.

Ginny had been scared, and eleven once. She’d told herself then she would never be that girl again. Growing up hadn’t been a choice, it had been her only chance to survive.

 

-

 

She puts George to bed on the couch in their (his) cramped and cluttered living room. She tucks him up under a blanket and sits for a while, tracing her fingers up and down his side. It is three parts aimless and one part gift. It isn’t until his face relaxes into sleep that she realises how tightly drawn it had been when he was still awake.

She curls up on a hard wooden chair by a tiny window, and closes her eyes. She doesn’t sleep, is half convinced that she is never going to sleep again. Sleep seems like a cheap illusion of death and oh, but she has had enough death to last her a lifetime.

She wonders if Harry is awake too.

She wonders where Dean is, if Neville found his Grandmother yet.

She wonders how many of her little warriors survived the fight. How many of the younger ones had crept back to the castle. She wonders how many funerals she will have to attend. Perhaps just one, a funeral for everyone hurt, and lost, and dead. A funeral to mourn their innocence, their childhood. A funeral where the names of the dead could be read, a list long enough to fill even the coldest hearts with despair.

Ginny swallows around the lump in her throat.

She wonders what Luna is doing.

 

-

 

It is days before she can bear to do anything but drift aimlessly around the dim flat and make endless cups of tea and cocoa. They keep her afloat in an endless sea of sleeplessness.

It isn’t that she is afraid of what might happen to her while she sleeps. Although she still jumps at loud noises and panics slightly anytime she can’t locate her wand at a moment’s notice, she feels safer than she has felt in months. She has old habits to unlearn, but she can afford to feel peaceful.

It is the memories she is running from. When she closes her eyes, they flood to the surface. Children screaming, her best friends writhing in pain and wave after wave of the kind of terror that roots you to the spot, a useless bystander.

She doesn’t want to lose herself to that pain.

 

-

 

She kissed Neville once, curled up on a worn down couch that had materialised itself in the corner of the Room of Requirement for them (or really, for Neville). It was not long after Luna had been snatched away right in front of their eyes, and a good while before things got bad enough that the rebellion in their veins started to bubble up. In that moment, they were paper dolls painted with nothing but sadness and terror.

The kiss was eight-tenths a desperate desire to feel something good for once. The other two-tenths were made up of the way Ginny loved Neville, in just about all the wrong ways. To his testament, he did not push her away. He also did not kiss her back.

When Ginny pulled away, she had sighed.

“I wish-” she had said, voice full of regret.

“I know,” Neville had replied. His voice had been full of kindness.

Ginny had thought then that she might never meet anyone like Neville, and the unfairness of it all had been an itch under her skin. She hated the way that love seemed to be something she always had but never wanted, and when she did want it, she never had enough.

There had been a time when Ginny considered herself a little bit in love with everyone she knew. Her mother and father, her stupid smelly brothers. Her two best friends at Ottery St. Catchpole, both muggles. The lady at the general store who always gave them an extra sweet in their paper bags of goodies. And then there was Harry Potter.

Ginny had grown older somewhat since then, realised that the whole world will not love you. That the whole world does not deserve to be loved.

Lessons like that are almost always hard-earned.

 

-

 

A week and a half after it’s all over for good, all the funerals and speeches and terrible parties that nobody enjoys, Hermione shows up on the doorstep of the twins flat. (Ginny supposes that at some point she is going to have to stop calling it that, even inside her own head).

“Hello,” Hermione says, and it’s ragged and tired. Ginny relates.

“C’mon in,” Ginny tells her, and turns to lead her up the stairs.

The inside of the flat is dim and musty. Ginny has made no effort to clean, partly because she has a deep rooted instinct to never touch any of her brother’s stuff. And partly because she has no idea what is George’s and what is- was Fred’s, and she has no intention of asking George, who has done nothing but sleep and eat since she got him here.

“How is he?” Hermione asks, quietly.

“He’s,” Ginny sighs, and turns to run her fingers aimlessly along the back of the couch. “Sleeping mostly. I’ve been keeping him calm, trying to let him heal.”

Hermione nods, but Ginny can tell from the way her mouth is pinched together that there is something she wants to say.

“What?” Ginny asks. Sometime around the point where she stopped fearing for her life, she managed to lose her brain-to-mouth filter.

Hermione’s eyes flick up in surprise. “I, uh. I was just wondering how you’re keeping him calm. Dreamless sleep potions can have side effects when you use them long-term…” she trails off.

Ginny almost smiles at how very Hermione this line of inquiry is.

“I’m not giving him dreamless sleep, I’ve not got any. And I’m awful at potions, you know that.”

Hermione gives her a smile filled with polite confusion.

“It’s a- well, not a spell exactly,” Ginny expands reluctantly. “Something Luna showed me.”

“Oh,” Hermione says, and Ginny almost laughs at the expression on her face, the one she always gets when Luna is mentioned. A mix between constipated and endeared, maybe.

“It’s harmless,” Ginny reassures. “Really, I know what I’m doing.”

Hermione deflates, and for a long moment neither of them speak at all.

Ginny is lost in memories, of tracing patterns onto the arms and backs of shivering children to try and bring them peace and warmth when the world had seemed devoid of such things.

Hermione doesn’t stay long, but she lingers slightly on the threshold as she’s leaving, loading Ginny with admonishments to look after herself.

“You should be eating more,” Hermione tells her, in what could have passed as an imitation of Ginny’s own mother.

“Love you too, ‘Mione”, Ginny tells her. She’s never been one to bury her sentiments, these days even less so.

 

-

 

It’s two and a half months before George comes back to her, and Ginny spends the time hiding from the world. She gets snippets of news, in owls from her parents and short visits from Hermione. The wizarding world is moving on, rebuilding. Hermione tells her that she is thinking of going back to Hogwarts and hints heavily that Ginny should go back too.

Ginny wonders how Hermione can stand the thought of it, of returning to the long corridors which echo with the memories of every hurt, every death. Every scream.

She thinks about the cracked rubble, the dust. She thinks about Alecto Carrow’s face, twisted into something like delight as she trained her wand on some third year. There is not an inch of the old castle that would not fill her with these thoughts.

George tells her that she needs to move on, move forward. She snorts.

“What, like you are?” She asks, scornfully.

He shakes his head, sadness weighing down the movement until it is barely noticeable. He gestures to her wand hand, empty but restless, tracing patterns into the worn fabric of her jeans.

“You don’t need to do that anymore,” he tells her.

Ginny pulls her hand away, as fast as if the fabric had caught fire. “Just habit, I guess,” she says.

For a moment they sit in silence, and then George stands, puts his empty mug on the washboard, and trails out of the room. Ginny sighs.

It takes her a couple of hours to work herself around to apologising, but that is okay because hours have become seconds in the long months of nothingness she has wrapped herself up in.

She finds George, curled up in a patchwork blanket on his bed.

“Sorry,” she says, and he shuffles over to make room for her beside him.

Ginny sighs, wriggles onto the bed with him, and turns to drop her head onto his shoulder.

“You’re so much stronger than me,” she says, her voice too loud and too fast.

George’s mouth pinches together, and he shakes his head, jostling Ginny somewhat.

“Maybe it isn’t a competition of who’s stronger,” he says. “Maybe it just matters that we’re still fighting at all.”

His voice is slow and steady, and it startles Ginny. She wonders when she got to be the one that is falling apart.

 

-

 

George kicks her out, in the nicest of ways, a week or so later. He tells her she needs her own space, and so does he. He tells her he needs to learn to sleep without a haze of borrowed peace and forgetfulness. She wonders if after all this, George has become a little bit wise.

She finds herself a flat in Muggle London, tucked away on the second story of a building two blocks back from a busy shopping street. It’s a five minute walk to a Tescos, which she explores with an inherited sort of curiosity. The pale fluorescent lighting and brightly packaged foods seem alien, but the cheery lady who comes and asks her if she needs anything reminds her of her mother.

She goes home that night, for the first time since, well. Since she left the last time for Hogwarts, back when nothing had been sure.

Her mother envelops her in a bone-crushing hug and her dad stands nearby looking quietly glad to see her. There are a handful of people over for dinner - some she knows through the old Order, and some friends older than that, the kind who Ginny doesn’t even remember meeting. There is a good natured scramble to shift places at the cramped dinner table to make space for her, and then the racket of conversation picks up where it left off.

Molly serves Ginny about a week's worth of food on a single plate, and beams at her silently from her place, three seats over. Ginny smiles back, and then engages her father in a conversation about Tescos.

A little later, she glances around the table and spots Percy, seated diagonally across from her. He catches her gaze, and smiles hesitantly. There is something in his expression that she half recognises, and it takes Ginny a moment to place it. There is guilt settled into the very lines of his face, an expression achingly familiar because Ginny has become used to living with a man who wears it every waking minute.

After dinner, she grabs his elbow in the dim hallway and pulls him to the side.

“Hey, Perce.” She smiles at him, softly.

“How- how is he?” Percy asks, and Ginny spares a moment to wonder how long it will be before that is no longer the first thing anyone asks her.

“He’s-” she hesitates and then plunges on. “He isn’t good, that would be ridiculous. But he isn’t awful either. He told me the other day that he keeps wondering what he is supposed to do now. I didn’t know what to say. I’m not sure any of us really know that.”

Percy’s face is stretched thin. She recognises the weight of his grief from seeing it reflected in the mirror.

“Look, Percy,” she says, catching his hand in her own. “You should go see him, he’s lonely I think.”

Percy starts, looking up to meet her eyes with shock written all over his face. “Surely he wouldn’t want-”

“Oh stop it,” Ginny tells him crossly, cutting him off. “He doesn’t blame you. He blames himself. He kicked me out because he didn’t want to keep me from moving on, but he has no idea how to be by himself.”

Ginny hears someone call her name from the kitchen and half turns away, then looks back at Percy with an earnest expression. “He could really use the company, Perce. Just think about it, okay?”

Percy nods, haltingly. Ginny smiles at him, and squeezes his hand before turning away in a swirl of red hair. It’s the most alive she’s felt in months.

 

-

 

Ginny spends the second week in her new apartment drafting letter after letter to Luna. She can’t seem to find the words that she needs, constantly worrying about the chasm that opened between them in the moment when Luna had been dragged away and Ginny had stood by, helpless.

With Neville, it’s different. Ginny knows that Neville is giving her space, that he is waiting for her to heal herself before they are ready to rediscover what they mean to each other, without the war, and the fear.

(Some days Ginny wonders if she is the only one who feels as if her entire life has been demolished, providing not a fresh start but rather a sea of rubble upon which she must rebuild everything she was once so sure of.)

Luna, though.

The Luna that Ginny knew wouldn’t be waiting for Ginny to heal. The Luna that Ginny knew would be settling her hand into the crook of Ginny’s elbow and tucking elderberry blossoms in her hair, for their healing properties.

Ginny has little faith in the powers of elderberry blossoms or radish talismans, but Luna herself has always been a force of nature. Ginny aches with missing her.

 

> _Dear Luna, I hope you are well-_
> 
> _Dear Luna, Hermione said you were staying with Fleur and Bill the last that she-_
> 
> _Luna, so much has changed since the end of the war and I-_
> 
> _Dearest Luna, can I see you? I’d like to see you, if that’s-_
> 
> _Luna. Oh, Luna. We were just children and now look-_

In the end, Ginny sends none of her unfinished notes and letters. In the end, Luna comes to her without being asked.

There is a knock on her apartment door, and she opens it and it’s just- Luna. Her wand, tucked into the pocket of her tunic, is unfamiliar and there is something about the set of her mouth that is foreign to Ginny, but otherwise it’s Luna. Her hair is knotty and her clothes are eccentric and she smells like bitter tea and peach.

“Hi, Ginny,” Luna says, with her same wide smile, and then Ginny is hugging her. One second they are separated by the doorframe, and the next they are pressed together. Ginny is laughing, and curling her fingers into the soft fabric of Luna’s shirt. For such a fragile looking person, Luna’s hugs are strong.

Ginny drags Luna into the flat, and if both of their eyes are a little sadder than the last time they spoke, neither of them mention it. Ginny is too busy basking in the presence of a long-lost friend, and Luna is too busy drifting around the apartment and admiring everything from Ginny’s alarm clock to her turnips.

They finally settle on the couch, and start to talk.

“How have you been?” Ginny asks.

“Oh, good. Daddy’s house is all ruined so we’ve been fixing it up.” She smiles another wide smile. “I have so many ideas for the new one. Daddy said I can choose all the colours.”

Ginny smiles a secret smile at the image this brings her, while Luna details her plans for the house.

“We’re re-planting some of the garden too, and it made me think that we should have a Nargle habitat in the top of the house. They like it up high, you know. Daddy was saying they are attracted to moving things so I want to string up lots of charms and so on, to give them somewhere to play.”

“That sounds beautiful,” Ginny says, absolutely sincerely. She glances around her own apartment and grimaces. “This place is a little plain, really.”

Luna cocks her head and surveys the room thoughtfully. The apartment is cramped and plain, although not actively unliveable. There is no mould or terrible marks on the walls, and the carpet doesn’t sport any suspicious stains.

“It doesn’t feel quite like a home yet, “ Luna says, and she’s exactly right. Ginny smiles, and Luna laughs slightly. “It will do soon enough.”

It is only then that Ginny lets her eyes fall shut, lets the sound of Luna’s laugh and the warmth of her presence wash over her like a gently cresting wave. It feels like a blessing and a homecoming. For the first time in a long time, she feels truly at peace.


End file.
